Smile

  I hadn’t heard that phrase, ‘a bike’, in years. It was like a piece of history being taken out and shown to me. A slightly uncomfortable piece of history.

  —No, I said.

  —Blonde bird, tall, Holy Faith, Bowie fan, woman’s tits.

  She was starting to come together; I thought I was remembering someone.

  —You all fancied her, he said again.

  —And you didn’t?

  —Well, I did. But I couldn’t.

  —How come?

  —She was my sister, he said.

  The laugh exploded out of him, as if he’d been holding on to it for years. There was nothing funny in it. The girl was in my head now, Síle Fitzpatrick, but I wished she wasn’t. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t know her. But I could see her sitting on the low ledge outside the chipper, her back to the glass. I was inside, looking at her hair, her shoulders, her white uniform shirt tucked into her skirt. I wanted her to turn and look in. I wanted her to look at me.

  —You remember me now, I bet.

  I didn’t. But I remembered his sister.

  —Yeah, I said.—I do now. Sorry.

  What was his name? He’d been in my class for five years; he must have been. Fitzpatrick, Fitzpatrick.

  I had it.

  —Edward.

  —Good man, he said.

  I knew him, and I’d known him years ago. I knew his face and I’d known his face.

  —Eddie, I said.

  —I kind of prefer Ed these days, he said.—More adult.

  He shrugged.

  —Finally had to grow up, he said.

  What he’d told me just before he’d laughed – one of the words came back and nudged me.

  —You said ‘was’. You said she was your sister.

  —Yeah, he said.

  —Was, I said.

  —Yeah.

  —Sorry – I said.—I don’t – She’s not – ?

  —Dead?

  —Is she?

  —No, he said.—No. We’re not close, just.

  —Oh.

  —Yeah.

  —Grand.

  —Say no more, says you.

  The gap was beginning to close. ‘Say no more, squire’ – the Monty Python line was straight from the schooldays.

  —You meeting someone? he asked me now.

  —No, I said.—No. Just having a pint.

  —Same as myself. D’you live near here, so?

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to explain.

  —Or just visiting? he said.—Slumming it for a bit.

  —No.

  —No?

  —I live down the road there – five minutes.

  —Oh grand, he said.—So this is your local.

  —Not really.

  —Fuck this, he said.

  He stood up and picked up his stool; he’d scooped it from under himself before he was upright. I didn’t have time to cower. But he turned to the table beside us and lowered the stool one-handed while he grabbed a chair with the other and dragged it across to him. He sat down, and back.

  —That’s better.

  There was even more of his leg on show now. He didn’t seem to be wearing underwear.

  —So, he said.—Yeah.

  I waited.

  —I was away myself for a bit, he said.

  —Were you?

  —Yeah, he said.—Here and there. Nothing special. But Síle. She’d love to hear from you.

  He’d guessed it: Síle was the only thing I liked about him.

  —I hardly knew her, I said.

  —Go on to fuck.

  —It’s true.

  —Yeah, yeah, he said.—She fancied you. Big time. Had me plagued. Is he going to college? What’s his favourite Bowie song? Is he going with anyone? A right pain in the arse.

  —‘Heroes’, I said.

  —What?

  —My favourite Bowie song.

  He laughed. He sat back, almost lay back, and barked at the ceiling. There was grey pubic hair poking out of his shorts. He sat up, adjusted his crotch. Had he caught me looking at him?

  —D’you know what? he said.—I’d say she’d still be interested in knowing that.

  —What?

  —Síle, he said.—She’d love to know that ‘Heroes’ was your favourite Bowie song. I don’t believe that, by the way. Now maybe, but we’re talking about – when? 1975 or ’6. ‘Heroes’ was released in 1977. So you’re spoofing. As usual. You can fuck off, so you can. Vict’ry.

  I should have stood up.

  —Remember we used to call you that? he said.

  I should have just left. He might have followed me but I should have walked out and kept walking. I’d have been giving nothing away. Because I found out later, he already knew where I lived.

  2

  I was so bored, so heavy with the physical weight of it, I could have cried; I could have stopped breathing. At the same time, I was often terrified and I laughed so much I went blind. I went to the school, St Martin’s CBS, for five years and I had an erection for four of them, even during Irish. I sat through Peig and Ó Pheann an Phiarsaigh and thought of legs and nipples and the birds on Benny Hill and my friends’ mothers and sisters. And the women in the Sunday World. And the pictures of footballers’ wives that were sometimes in Football Weekly. And Lynsey de Paul. And the women in Abba. And Pan’s People. I rode the desk, or I tried to.

  Moonshine was sitting in the desk behind me. He jabbed at my back with his Doc Marten.

  —Right, Vict’ry, he whispered.—Go on. Your time has come.

  —Fuck off, I whispered back.

  —Go on.

  —Fuck off.

  —Quiet at the back, said Brother Murphy.

  He was up at the front, writing the homework on the blackboard. He wasn’t as savage as most of the other Brothers and lay teachers. Just now and again, he lost the head. Something would snap and there’d be no warning. He’d headbutted Cyril Toner when there’d been almost total silence in the room. I’d been doing French comprehension, thinking of French girls’ mouths sucking the words, when I heard a kind of thump, and a groan. I looked up. Murphy was staggering back, holding his forehead, and Toner just stood there. His hands were hiding his nose. He was squealing and there was blood coming through his fingers. Dripping. It was frightening and cool; it was history. Christian Brother Loafs Student. And – this was the vital part – he hadn’t loafed me. Relief, shame, joy. Toner was a wanker.

  And nothing happened; there were no consequences. Toner went home with a broken nose after Murphy sent him to the Head Brother’s office. And Toner would have felt lucky when he got out of the Head Brother’s office without being assaulted again. That was the thing: it wasn’t assault. Not back then. It wasn’t what most of us saw at home and it wasn’t what we’d experienced in the national school, the primary school. But I never thought I was witnessing anything illegal. Even being felt up by a Brother was just bad luck or bad timing. Toner wouldn’t have told his parents. He’d have given them a story. A football in the face, or a hurley, a slammed door, an elbow; the school was full of good, believable ways to break your nose. They’d have all laughed about it in the Toner kitchen. The Head Brother hadn’t brought him home or to the Mater A&E. He’d just been sent on his way. The Brothers knew they were safe.

  But fuck Toner. It wasn’t my nose. Fuck him. Murphy wasn’t the worst. Although he liked me.

  That was why I’d been kicked in the back by Moonshine.

  —Make him smile.

  —Fuck off.

  Brother Murphy was about forty-five, but it was hard to put an age on adults. I never saw them as younger or older than my father. All men seemed to be that age. But it wasn’t the age; it was distance. They seemed far away, in another room or country.
Men – not just the Brothers – had nothing in common with us. I didn’t understand them. And I wasn’t alone. My mates were with me: all men were fuckin’ eejits.

  Brother Murphy was small, the same height as most of us. But he was wide. He came through the door sideways. His hair was cartoon black. It might have been dyed, but that wouldn’t have occurred to us. He had a head and a jaw like Desperate Dan’s. But he enjoyed his subject and he loved talking to himself in French at the top of the room. We, the pupils, never spoke French. We read and wrote but learning to speak wasn’t on the curriculum. There was one day, he was at the front of the room reading from the Inter Cert book. I can’t remember its name but there was a skinny boy called Marcel – the book had illustrations – and he lived in a place called Saint-Cloud. I remember watching Murphy and thinking, ‘He wishes he was there.’ He wanted to be a Frenchman. He wanted a beret and a Renault, and a son called Marcel. He was happy in the book. I’m older than he was back then and I think I recognise it now: he was miserable. He was lonely.

  And this violent man with the Desperate Dan head liked me. I knew this – everybody knew this – because of something he’d said more than two years before, when I was thirteen.

  —Victor Forde, I can never resist your smile.

  It was like a line from a film, in a very wrong place. I knew I was doomed.

  It had been one of Murphy’s happy days and we were at him to let us off homework for the weekend. It was Friday afternoon and the sun was heating the room, spreading the smell. The school was right beside the sea and we could hear the tide behind the yard wall.

  —Go on, Brother.

  —S’il vous plaît, Brother.

  —We’ll pray for you on Sunday, Brother.

  He listened to us and grinned. It was a grin, not a smile. The word ‘inappropriate’ didn’t appear until years later. But the grin was inappropriate. It was all inappropriate. He was being taunted and teased by a room of boys and he was loving it.

  Then he said it.

  —Victor Forde, I can never resist your smile.

  There was silence.

  It was late September. I’d only been in the secondary school for three or four weeks. I hadn’t even got the hang of it. All the different teachers, the size of the older boys, the violence and the constant threat of it. And the place itself was a maze; the school was actually a row of large red-brick houses. The trip from Geography to Science involved leaving one room, going through another room after knocking at the door and enduring the sneers and kicks of the fifth-years; out to the yard, into another house, through what must originally have been the kitchen door, down a hall, and left, into a science lab that had a bay window with a view of the railway embankment and a huge fireplace. And thirty Bunsen burners. And a mad chain-smoking prick in a white coat leaning against his desk. Every day was exhausting. Exciting and upsetting.

  The silent response to Murphy’s declaration would eventually have to end. But I hoped it wouldn’t. There was still the possibility that he hadn’t said it. While the silence lasted. But it ended.

  Someone exhaled.

  Everyone exhaled. Murphy had turned his back on us. He picked up his personal duster and rubbed out the homework.

  —You win today, boys, he said.—No homework.

  —He fuckin’ fancies him, Derek Muldowney, sitting beside me, whispered.

  Him, not you. Muldowney shifted away from me. I wanted to pull him back. It’s nothing to do with me!

  —He’s a queer.

  —You’re a queer.

  —Murphy knows you’re a queer.

  —I wasn’t smiling, I told them.—I wasn’t.

  He’d been looking at me – Murphy had; he must have been – all that time. I can never resist your smile, he’d said. Never. He’d seen me when I’d walked in the front gate on the first day. The Brothers’ house was beside the school. All the Brothers lived in there. Murphy must have been looking out the window of his bedroom, at all the new first-years as they arrived. And he’d decided that I was the one. There were boys in the class who still looked a bit like girls. Or there was Willo Gaffney, who said he had to shave twice a week. There was Kenny Peters who had a scar on his forehead and was absent from school every time the Circuit Court came to the GAA club. I couldn’t see why he’d picked on me. I wasn’t like a girl or a man. I’d no big brothers; no one had warned me about him. Never smile back at him. Never get ten out of ten. Never get below five – don’t give him any excuse to keep you back after the bell.

  I’d gone into a school that was a row of big, detached houses, with black gates, a neat hedge and trees that looked as if they’d been planted hundreds of years ago. I’d walked out of our estate – there’d been five or six of us, together – where most of the trees hadn’t survived, where some of the footpaths hadn’t been finished. I hadn’t been in there half an hour before I’d been hit, lifted by an ear and dropped, been called an eejit by the prick in the science lab because I thought he was pointing at someone else; I’d got lost and ended up in the senior yard and got kicked by a gang of lads who wouldn’t have touched me, or even noticed me, outside school. But I wasn’t alone. We were all thrown, all the first-years, all around the place. We suffered together and it was great. Then, last class, first day, before going home to my mother’s questions, the French teacher, Brother Murphy, smiled at me, the first adult to smile all day, and I smiled back.

  —And you are?

  —Victor Forde.

  —Victor Forde, Brother.

  —Sorry, Brother.

  —Have I had the pleasure of teaching any older Fordes? Any Defeats or Armistices?

  —No, Brother.

  I was pleased; I’d remembered to call him Brother.

  He smiled again.

  —Fine, he said.

  He put a finger on my shoulder – it was just a strange little friendly, comical nudge – and pointed to a desk halfway down, under the window.

  —You’ll sit there.

  —Thank you, Brother.

  He smiled. But he’d smiled at all of us.

  —Have I had the pleasure of teaching any older Kellys? he asked Moonshine.

  —Yes, Brother.

  —Oh, God help us.

  He didn’t mind when we laughed.

  —So, said my mother when I got home.

  She was excited, young; she’d never gone to secondary school, herself.

  —How was school?

  —Great, I said.

  I meant it.

  Her eyes were wet.

  —I’m so proud of you, Victor.

  She picked up my sister to make her kiss me, then made egg and chips to celebrate the occasion. I couldn’t wait to go back in the next morning.

  But then Murphy singled me out. He’d been smiling at all of us but then he’d announced that I was the one whose smile he couldn’t resist. I knew the others were going to kill me. I knew it as I began to understand what Murphy was saying and what it meant. I knew the lads would destroy me after the bell went and we were outside. And they did. They didn’t even have to wait until we were outside the school grounds. The Brothers never minded violence. There was no point in trying to avoid it. I was surrounded, pushed.

  —Yeh fuckin’ queer.

  —I didn’t smile.

  A schoolbag – a Leeds United kitbag – was swung high and into my back. It hurt but I laughed. The slaps became thumps. They were all over me now. But it wouldn’t last; I knew that too. I was kicked, punched, spat on. For a minute. Only a few of the kicks really hurt, and the thumps were just to my arms and chest. No one thumped or kicked me in my face. The spitting – we did that all the time.

  It was over. There was space around me. They’d drifted away. Only my real friends stayed behind. They laughed. And I laughed. I could breathe. It was over. Moonshine handed me my schoolbag. Do
c picked my jumper up off the ground and walloped the muck off it.

  I was sick when I got home. I put my mouth right over the bowl, so the vomit wouldn’t splash too much. I waited in the bathroom until my eyes looked normal again. I put on my jumper, so my mother wouldn’t see the bruises on my arms.

  And it wasn’t over at all. I was stuck with it, what Murphy had said; I became the Queer.

  —Murphy’s in his moods.

  —We’ll get the Queer to smile at him.

  —Go on.

  —Fuck off.

  I was the Queer for forty minutes a day three times a week, and for an hour and twenty minutes on Fridays, right through the first year. My mother never noticed how I started to feel sick on Thursday evenings, about once a month – I knew what I could get away with. She never spotted the pattern. I was sick on Fridays but I ran to school on Tuesdays. We didn’t have French on Tuesdays.

  But staying away didn’t work. I was miserable because I wanted to be in school. I wanted to be with the lads. And it didn’t work because, nearly three years later, I was still the Queer and Murphy still couldn’t resist my smile.

  —Smile at him.

  —Fuck off.

  —Go on.

  I didn’t know – and I still don’t – why I changed my mind that day, why I decided to give up and accept the role. I don’t think it was a real decision. I just felt it – surrender.

  I put my hand up and clicked my fingers.

  —Brother?

  I heard Kenny Peters.

  —For fuck sake.

  I was suddenly, unexpectedly, delighted. I was frightening even Kenny Peters. I did the click business again.

  —Brother.

  —Oui? said Murphy.

  He turned from the blackboard to see who wanted him. At the same time, I heard the Canadian geese flying over the school, and honking. It was early April.

  —The geese are going home to Canada, Brother, I told him.—Spring is in the air.

  I wasn’t looking at anyone else but I knew they couldn’t believe what they were hearing. I was actually being the Queer, talking about spring and the geese.